A Variation
by Jicama
Summary: Reid, like some other members of his team, has had more than one brush with death. Now he's having another one, but this time the unsub is irrelevant because he's busy having a conversation with the grim reaper.
1. Rather Unexpected

To be fair, there really had been no way to profile that the unsub would be the type to hide under the bed. He was a 43-year-old Caucasian male; he was angry after his wife divorced him and his dating attempts failed so he attacked his victims after their dates. According to witnesses, he never looked another man in the eye, and he was always insulting the women he was with but that didn't mean they would know he'd try such a childish and illogical stunt. It wasn't surprising either that the officer clearing the bedroom, one of the town's own, didn't think to check. How often did they have a suspect hide there? What logical adult would hide there to avoid the police? Besides, the back door leading to some woods had been left ajar and that seemed like a far more likely escape route. A helpful neighbor shouted, "There he goes!" from the safety of his backyard, no question who he tried to help. It had really only been left open for the unsub's dog, but they didn't know that. If they hadn't taken the dog to the helpful neighbor's, the dog would have shown them where her master was. But nobody would think of it, and it wasn't protocol to keep pets around.

Reid stepped through the doorway after the room was cleared. The local police would lead the search in the woods, taking Morgan with them. They were calling in the dogs and expected to have their man before tomorrow morning. The sun was setting, and the wooded area was surrounded by residential areas on all sides. He'd be seen quickly. The news crews had his photo and the local and national news was airing the search live. That left the rest of the team in this man's house to figure out why he killed them the way he did – strapped to a bed and abused – and what he did with their fingers. Anything else they learned would be solely for the FBI records as the local PD didn't seem to care what they found unless it helped put and keep the man in jail. Reid was inclined to disagree, the knowledge was invaluable for them as well but he knew it was pointless to explain and giving them the team's findings in hard copy would have to do.

He started by going through the trunk at the foot of the bed, bent over it as he lifted out some blankets and tossed them onto the floor. He found a cheap photo album, and in it was photos of the murders as they were committed. Reid reminded himself he really had seen worse, but still flipped through it quickly as possible. There was nothing but the photos, and they had all been glued on the same way. Though they showed their unsub removing the fingers, they didn't show what had been done with them or a definite location where the women had been held during their murders. Reid did however feel hopeful that they showed enough to guess a location. Metal siding suggested a shed, possibly the one in the backyard.

"Hey Hotch, I found photos of the crimes! There's evidence of the location as well." He leaned out the door and shouted. Hotch stepped into the hall from the office and nodded.

"Bag them and keep looking. PD already found another woman in his shed. I want to know if there's anywhere he's likely to go." He didn't feel the need to say she was already dead, probably hours before they had arrived.

"On it." Reid passed off the album to a crime scene tech to continue searching, first the trunk, then the bedside tables and lastly the bureau on the wall opposite the bed. So far nothing, until he found a notebook a dozen minutes later, which turned out to be the unsub's diary. "Oh…"

The unsub, known to his neighbors and Danny, saw the FBI agent with his journal and panicked. He'd kept quiet so long; he'd pressed his face into the wood floor trying not to make a sound with his breathing. But the sight of that man _reading_ and _judging_ his private thoughts infuriated him, and he slid out from under the bed, shoving the trunk aside and shooting up at the man. The noise of the shot and the young looking agent's shout brought in the PD and the remaining FBI profilers. Daniel Keenan was shot and dragged out. Reid was caught by Aaron Hotchner and placed on the floor. Paramedics were sent for. Reid heard Emily talking to him, telling him to stay awake and to talk to her, recite something, but his chest was burning. The pain, and what he vaguely realized was blood loss from being shot was too much and he passed out.

When Reid woke up again, he was in the ambulance and the two EMTs were busy above and beside him. Prentiss was with him, he thought she was holding his hand. But he saw another person there too, sitting beside Emily and smiling, without malice and enjoying his pain, but not with sympathy either. Reid tried to point to her, to ask Emily who she was, but the air mask muffled his voice and Emily told him be calm, he was going to be fine. The girl nodded and patted his leg. Reid was wondering why she would be there, and then slowly fell back asleep.

The doctor decided he was tired of passing out and waking up somewhere different when he woke up again on a gurney, speeding down the halls of the hospital. Hospital ceilings were practically identical, and he was tired of waking up to see them. The medical doctors and nurses shouted things he couldn't quite understand, and he couldn't focus very well on what they looked like.

'Blood loss is annoying…' He tried to say, but the mask giving him oxygen had been replaced with a tube and the movement discouraged him from trying to speak after the first syllable. Emily was gone, but the girl was there still. She was facing away from him, sitting on the end of the gurney and singing something he knew he recognized, but couldn't immediately name. She looked over her shoulder and winked at him, still singing. Her face was dotted with piercings, and her black hair was impossibly long; the top layers piled on top of her head, the rest hanging down her back. Reid decided she must be a hallucination from blood loss and willingly went unconscious again.


	2. Vague

"Alright, sleepy head. I need you to focus now."

There was no easing into awakening as he had before when in the ambulance and was on the gurney. Reid bolted awake, gasping for air and heart throbbing as if he had been dreaming of falling. He stood in his hospital room, wearing his clothes from before he was shot and the Kevlar vest. Next to him was the girl from the gurney and in front of him was a hospital bed.

"Who is that?" He asked, even though in him mind he was certain that man was himself. But if he was standing there, how could it be?

"That would be you, technically." She replied, glancing up at him with a half-smile. "Technically because what makes you _completely_ _you_ is out here right now."

Reid stared at her, profiling her instantly and trying to understand what exactly she might mean by that. "It's impossible for a person to be outside of their body, unless you believe in the phenomenon known as "out of body" experiences, also known as astral projection. To date there hasn't been any way to prove, scientifically speaking, that such an act would be possible. I've read plenty on the subject, but that would hardly make me capable of astral projection and that wouldn't explain you in the ambulance and on the gurney coming in here. So who is that and how am I standing here when I distinctly remember being _shot_?"

"I knew you wouldn't remember me." She sighed, looking rather put out. "Let's get through this again, then."

"What? I have an eidetic memory, and while that may center mostly on what I read, I'm fairly certain I've never seen you before today. This is ridiculous. What kind of joke is this? Who are you!?"

"Getting hysterical will get you nowhere, doctor." The girl sighed again and crossed her arms. She turned to face Reid completely. "I am, and have been since you first started living, been your death."

"You- you honestly expect me to believe that?" Obviously Reid wasn't going to give in to that nagging feeling in his mind yet. The man on the bed may look like him (though he didn't think he was that skinny, and the pallor of his skin must be from blood loss), but it couldn't actually be him. He and the girl stared at each other. Reid amended his thinking. She was clearly an adult underneath the lipstick and piercings. She was just shorter than him, not really much younger.

"I've met you before. I even once came for you before you left your mother's womb. She was having an episode, but she pulled through rather well. I watched you as a child, when the man named Gary Michaels first approached you, and I was there most of the time until he was killed. Later, when you were tied to the goal post I was there, but only until the last football player was distracted. When you were in the house with anthrax, and on the floor with Hotchner and Dowd was above you, I was there. I even stuck around when Hotch started kicking you, in case he broke the wrong rib. And when Tobias Hankle nearly killed you, we spoke for the first time."

Reid took a breath and looked at the person on the gurney. "How do you know that?" His mind raced with facts on comatose patients and near death experiences.

"SSA Dr. Spencer Reid, I am your death. Your personal grim reaper, if you will. I know everything about you, and a lot about the world never will." Despite the seriousness of her words, she was smiling. "We had a nice time, in that graveyard while we waited. We should try that again."

"The people standing over me." Reid's attention snapped back to the woman, the grim reaper, besides him. "That was us?"

"Yes it was. Though I admit I looked different then. Last time, you thought I was a plastic mask of a skull until I took a human shape." She shrugged. "Ah, and you can call me Romana again. I guess technically now it'd be Romana 2?"

"Your name is Romana?"

"You couldn't think of a better name and I always go by whatever name souls call me." Romana ruffled up her hair and sat on the edge of the gurney. "And I kept calling you doctor after you corrected me for calling you Spency."

Reid choked out a short laugh, quickly stopping himself. What she said started to sound familiar, like it had happened when he was still a toddler and was only starting to be reminded of it.

"So for every time I've nearly died, you would show up as a different person?" He asked, stealing another glance at his comatose body.

"That's about right. I might show up as the same person twice or the same every time. Most people only meet me once, after all. I do like the mask form though. I rather liked how Supervert wrote that."

"It was a good book." He replied, reminding himself of the essay quickly. "You said you were my death?" Reid asked, taking a seat in the chair against the wall. Romana moved to sit on the side, rather than the foot, of the bed. Spencer felt rather glad she took the care to avoid touching his hand with the IV needle inserted.

"I'm everyone's death. Yours, the people dying now in their beds or the battlefields; whether they lived too long or not long enough or just the right amount. That's all subjective to their opinions though." Romana shrugged, the black fabric of her band shirt riding up. "At this moment, I'm also in hundreds of places across the world, leading other people to their after."

"Heaven and Hell?"

Romana pulled her shirt down. "I really can't say. No, really." She emphasized at Reid's disbelieving expression. "I cannot name the after, not until I'm taking you there and there's no staying in this world. There are rules, just so you know."

"So why haven't your taken me anywhere?" Reid resisted the urge to cross his legs or his arms, choosing to keep a more open body posture. This was about to become a very nerve wracking conversation, and the sinking feeling he had it before was setting in like one of his headaches.

"It's not quite your time yet." She replied slowly, drawing out the 'quite'. She bit her bottom lip, chewing on it and her labrets for a few minutes as if she were deciding how to word something. When she spoke again, Reid noticed that somehow her lipstick hadn't been smudged at all like JJ's or Emily's might have. "At the moment, you're still alive. Mostly thanks to 'modern medicine'." She made air quotes at the phrase. "What it is, is really just your body refusing to let go. And your soul, which you are entirely right now by the way, won't let go either. You could last like this for a few more hours, or days, or months. Or."

"Or?" He shifted, uncomfortable at the thought that he was and wasn't in the room.

"You let me sever the tie and we go straight on with our day and our conversation on the way to the after." Romana replied, fiddling with the stud through her lip. "These things are strange…" She muttered. "I know why you thought of me in this form, but I really don't care for them."

"What if I don't want to die?" He asked, ignoring her aside. As far as he was concerned, she could look like Morgan or his mom. They sat in silence for a few moments after that, Romana watching Reid, and Reid watching Romana and his body. The monitor beeped; his heart rate and brain activity steady. But his blood pressure was low, and so was the volume his IV bag. He felt almost petty in thinking that was just insult to injury.

"Well, there are options. Choices. You always have choices, doctor."

"Do I?" Reid felt his temper rise. Really, between the things that the hospital could be doing to revive him and dealing with this- being half way to dead – Reid was starting to feel agitated and his temper was getting the better of him. But who could blame him?

"Of course. No matter what god or goddess you look to, they all give their humans free choice. It's the one thing I will never understand about humans." Romana stood and circled around to the other side of the bed to peer at the monitors. "Doctor, you can choose to wait as long as you like to go back to life. I won't be insulted. I can't even feel that kind of emotion. But keep in mind- there are ghosts for a reason." She looked up at him, glaring. Reid was certain this was her attempt to warn him of something, but he wasn't finding himself caring very much. "And those that choose to reject my gift cause me to feel the closest thing to anger or insult I can feel."

"And how exactly is someone refusing the mysterious 'after' really that offensive? Wouldn't it be rather obvious some people would rather stay with what they know instead of something you only call 'the after'?"

Romana rolled her eyes and stepped forward. In that moment, without any warning or even a blurring of her features, she was replaced with the stereotypical grim reaper. The black hood hung over the top half of a skull. Bone hands that shouldn't be able to hold themselves together without ligaments held a tall, crooked dark wood and steel scythe. The metal curve started to drip blood.

"I do not have to coddle you." She hissed. The skull's jaw didn't move, and the voice no longer sounded like just Romana was speaking. Reid pushed himself backwards, but the chair was already against the wall and his shoes slipped with nowhere to move. "You were born, and you lived. Your soul knew this day would come and fought against it, as souls will do. Before your place was decided, you agreed this would one day happen. Spencer Reid, child of Diana and William Reid, you have lived. If you reject what I offer- the after- so be it. But you will not like the torture a lost soul endures."

"T-torture?" He asked, voice unsure. Romana threw back her hood, revealing the full skull. There was no hair, no eyes or trace of flesh on the yellowing bone. She nodded.

"It is night here, in the living world." Romana stepped back, and when she sat at the end of the bed she was the girl with piercings and red lipstick again. Reid didn't think he should be so happy to see lips move. "Your team will be visiting you in a few more hours. You'll understand when they come in, or if you happen to see a nurse."

"Understand what?"

"You're a logical man, doctor. You'll understand." Romana stood and walked out of the room, the chains on her trip pants clinking. She ignored Reid's continued questions.

"Understand what? Where are you going? Romana!" Reid tried to follow her out, but after she rounded the doorway, she was gone. The only person in the hall was a nurse walking away from his room towards the nurses' station.

"Hey!" He shouted at her, then stepped out and tried to go after her. He felt more and more sluggish as he left his hospital room. When he reached the end of the hall with her, she stopped to talk to another nurse. Reid thought he would fall over soon from the exhaustion, but he stubbornly held on. He felt even worse however, when he realized that though the women were speaking, he couldn't understand them and their faces were blurry and warped like a fun house mirror. No matter how he tried, he couldn't pin down a single feature, not even the color of their hair. He grabbed one of their shoulders, trying to get himself balanced and maybe see clearly. Instead, she made a loud noise and jumped, unknowingly upsetting his balance. He collapsed onto the floor and was unconscious yet again.


	3. Understanding

He woke up again, a sudden jolt and an inhalation of cold antiseptic air. He was back at the foot of his bed, and around him stood his team. Just like the nurses, he couldn't tell what they said but he also wasn't even sure he could tell if they were his team. If not for the fact that he knew them for their height and body shape as well as their faces, he wouldn't have been able to tell. He recognized Rossi's shoes, Derek's arm tattoo, Hotch's body language and Emily's nails. JJ was wrapped up in a sweater, hands to her face as she cried.

"I'm not dead yet, guys." He croaked out, trying not to cry with JJ. He'd had that ridiculous crush on her years ago, and though it had faded and he thought of her as a sister now he was, emotionally speaking, closest to her.

"Doctor." Romana was beside him. "Do you understand?"

"Yes." He wiped away a tear from his eye and pulled in a shaky breath. "But I'm not letting go yet."

"I expected nothing else once you saw them." Romana nudged him towards a set of chairs against the wall. "And I will wait with you for as long as your body is living."

"Thanks."

An hour, then two passed before the team finally all left. He had no idea if they were headed back to Quantico or if they would wait for him. Romana was silent beside him, playing with her nails or the hem of her shirt as Reid processed the events leading up to his demise and until that moment. The day he was shot seemed fuzzy, and while no details escaped him, that time felt like he was remembering a dream compared to the situation he was in now.

"Why do you look like someone Emily would have hung out with in high school?" He asked suddenly, long after the team had left. "I know why I would have thought of the mask- I'd just read Necrophilia Variations. But a goth girl just seems cliched and sounds like a bad supernatural paperback."

"Well, after the mask I actually turned into the Romana character. I called you Spency when I was still a mask, and you corrected me, so I called you Doctor and voila! – I changed to look like Romana."

"But why do you look like a goth girl _now_?" Reid asked again, staring down Romana. She crossed her legs, making the chains on her pants clink together.

"It was after the incident with Henkel, obviously. You were still hooked on dilaudid. I was with you hours every day when you would shoot up, believe it or not. At any moment, your heart or your liver could have given up. But they didn't, and chances were slim of that anyways… I'm there for the slightest of chances regardless." She explained, looking Reid right in the eye as she continued. "There was one night when you had gone too long without a hit and after rushing through the purchase gave yourself a larger does than usual. I was there the moment you stepped in the doorway of that bar, and well into the next day. You shot up too much, and couldn't make it past the alley behind the place. If you had had your car, you would have died that night without a doubt because you would have wrecked. But the bartender, she came out and saw you and knew you for what you were – a junkie like her. She was a goth-" Romana gestured to her form. "-though during her shift she had worn a uniform and a blonde wig. She felt sorry for you and for herself; she took you home in her car and left you on your couch."

Romana pursed her lips and held up a finger for Reid to hold his response. "You saved her life that night, Reid. She gave up her addiction that night and weaned herself off of her own drug."

"So now I see her as death personified?"

"You thought I was her, taking you away to the after. She attributed your babbling to the drugs. I went from being a fictional character to a saving angel." Romana smirked and reached out to pet Reid's hand. "It's been a fun visit, Spencer. I hope you'll remember me better later."

"What?" Reid panicked and looked over to his body. His vitals were dropping and the machines ' alarms all went off. He was flat lining. He shot up out of the chair. "Son of a bitch!"

He didn't take the time to consider he may have just insulted his mother and himself as he watched nurses and doctors swarm his physical body. He knew everything they were doing, and everything they could do but he didn't know his chances. He never thought to read his charts, and he couldn't understand what they said anyways.

"Romana!" He spun on his heel, only to be met with an empty half of a hospital room. Romana was gone, and he was dying. He was going to die, and his grim reaper had left him? The room spun with the shock and horror of it all; he realized it was the beginning of one of his headaches. The lights were impossibly bright even as he covered his eyes in his hands and cuffs, there was a ringing in his ears and his the nerves in his head all lit up as if someone were bashing his head in. Reid collapsed, cursing his luck and cursing Romana for not even sticking around. Why was dying painful when you weren't even in your own body?

The lights remained, even when the pain and ringing noise had disappeared. He was laying down, he was breathing in sterile air. To his left, there was a table and a bouquet of flowers, and Morgan sat in a chair besides him, eating a plastic cup of pudding.

"Didn't we do this already?" He asked, groggy and confused like he had just come out of a dilaudid induced sleep. Nothing about the sensation felt comforting, so he started to move every joint and muscle he could to disperse it. Very quickly he found his abdomen was off limits.

"Hey hey, slow down. You need to stay still man. You got shot in the worst possible way. " Morgan dropped the cup to the floor and stood over Reid, gently keeping him from sitting up. "And last time I'm pretty sure it was jello, and I made sure to get my own cup instead."

"Good. You still owe me from last time."

"Reid, if you never got shot again I'll bring you jello every day of your life." Morgan laughed and Reid smiled, not trusting his chest with the motion laughing required. He breathed slowly and relaxed, remembering nothing of his time unconscious or that he'd had yet another meeting with death.

Invisible now that no one in that room was dying, the being called Romana laughed along with Derek and Spencer. She knew both of them very well, and like anyone who courted her (or him, or it, as you please) they held a special place in what might be considered a heart. One day, Death would take the souls that faced her repeatedly and bravely and take them to a special place, and the gods could be damned.

* * *

Okay, so this is pretty much over. I didn't want this to be a long thing, though I think its kinda rushed. If I figure out how to make it longer without it being wordy I will. But for the most part, this will be it. If anyone requests it, I will write the Henkel-Death scene as I imagined it. If I get no requests for it, then it will remain inside my head, as it serves no purpose to this.

Romana is a Time Lady from one of the Doctor's past reincarnations. I chose her since it owuld be a character Spencer would know as a Dr. Who fan, but someone who didn't know the show could just make up in their mind. Besides, she doesn't look like Romana in this story so I didn't think it'd matter.

Necrophilia Variations is a book by Supervert. It's easily found online and I recommend it if you're into a bit of macabre literature. The plastic skull mask is what inspired this entire story.


End file.
